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instead. Emmy took a long, hard drag from her smoke. “He sounded hot and thirsty. I guess there’s a lot of sand.”
    Her dad was a thick-necked man I’d met a handful of times when I’d gone to her house to avoid Stella after she found out about the baby. He was a sunburned, T-shirt-wearing kind of man who smelled like wood chips and drank Budweiser after he got home from work at the landscaping company. He liked to watch Dirty Jobs and This Old House and another show about fishermen in Alaska risking their lives to catch crab in the Bering Sea. He also liked to tell knock-knock jokes that weren’t very good. I remember him saying once that Emmy’s mom’s homemade spaghetti sauce was the best he had ever eaten.
    “Ever,” he said, and then he winked at me over his bottle of beer as he raised it to his lips.
    “I don’t think he’ll be able to get to a computer very often,” Emmy said, and she tossed the cigarette over the railing. “Dylan wants to write a poem about it for the spring issue of the lit mag.” The butt hit the ground and sizzled on the damp grass. “He wants to title it ‘Sandstorms.’”
    My stomach got all fluttery then, and I wondered if the baby could hear me and Emmy talking about the things that were closing in around us.
    “What if he never comes back, Lemon?” Emmy asked. “What if he’s gone? I can’t stay here for the rest of my life and take care of my mom and my sister.”
    And she was right, she couldn’t get stuck in Morgantown, stagnant and sad forever, just like I couldn’t get stuck inside Stella’s world, running and restless, endlessly unhinged.
    “I’m going to take you somewhere amazing,” I told her, and I took her hand and lowered our entwined fingers to my knee. “We’re going to take a trip over Christmas break, and when we get back you’ll be happy again,” I promised. “And I bet your dad will be home safe and sound soon, Emmy,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure he was ever coming back, wasn’t sure safe and sound was really ever possible.

     
    My first official prenatal appointment was scheduled for that Monday, and Stella took off from work early and picked me up from school so we could go to the hospital for the exam.
    “If you go, I go,” Stella said, which I was glad for. I always got nervous around doctors. I think it was the white coats: The clean, stiff fabric made me feel like they were hiding something. The white coats and the smell of all that sanitation.
    Dr. Stines asked a ton of questions about my medical history and decided to do an ultrasound to check for the heartbeat of the baby and to figure out exactly when my due date was. I lay on a table, eyes closed while the technician did the test, and all the while Stella stood next to the bed waiting for good news or bad, we weren’t sure yet.
    The tech tilted the monitor toward us. “Look.”
    And then the image showed up on the screen, and nothing mattered after that because I finally saw the thing I’d been so worried about, this tiny lump of shadow flickering on themonitor. The technician was talking about the fetal heart rate and the amniotic fluid volume, but all I could think of was this child I’d made in a tattoo parlor with a guy I’d probably never see again. This child who would be with me forever.
    I thought of Johnny Drinko, of how he’d probably never thought of me again after that day at the shop and how his life was probably no different now than it was before. And then I thought of my own dad, a man I’d never met, living somewhere far away in California, not thinking of me or Stella or the little heartbeat thumping in my stomach.
    But mostly I thought of my mother doing the same thing over seventeen years earlier all the way in San Francisco. I reached over and took her hand, and in the dark like that it was easy to imagine her just like me, laid out on a table watching the screen as her entire life changed, as she realized, just like I did, that nothing